News

Children ask a lot of fun questions, often quite persistently and while you are trying to cook food. One such question comes from the 9-year-old child of a Reddit user, who asked: “If helium is lighter than air, would a balloon with a vacuum in it, also float?” An excellent and enjoyable question. First, sorry […]

Sudden increases in methane concentrations in the Martian atmosphere have been a major puzzle for scientists, and the answer may lie in fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. The conclusion wouldn’t really change the prospects for life on our neighbor – but if it’s right, it would be a big step forward in knowing how to look […]

Lying can be pretty difficult to spot, even for the machines that are made to catch liars out. So how can we tell fact from fabrication? Researchers have a few tricks up their sleeves. Fibbing facial cues What do you get when you combine big data, machine learning tech, and facial analysis software with a […]

Another day, another blurring of the lines between reality and fiction. There’s a decent chance you’re one of the millions of people who’s watched the viral video of ants marching around a speaker that’s blasting AC/DC in a “death spiral”.  We hate to break it to you, but the video is fake.  The post (below) […]

A monstrous oviraptor from the Hell Creek Formation has been discovered in the US. Analysis of the hell chicken’s hindlimb suggests it weighed about 78 kilograms (172 pounds) and is a new-to-science species, indicating that there was a greater diversity of caenagnathid dinosaurs in the Hell Creek ecosystem shortly before the asteroid hit. The Chicxulub […]

Big news, everyone: the sausage catastrophe has been reproduced with tiny balls. Look. It’s a little-known fact in mathematics, but the more difficult your theorem is to prove, the sillier its name has to be. Take, for example, the fact that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on even-dimensional n-spheres – or to […]

If you grab a jar of honey out of the kitchen cupboard (or your jar of royal honey out of the bedside table), you’ll be able to see an expiration date stamped across the packaging. But does honey ever really “expire”? And if not, why? The components that make up honey are, crucially, nothing to […]

A huge breakthrough for endangered rhino species in Africa has been achieved through the world’s first in-vitro fertilization (IVF) rhino pregnancy. A team has successfully implanted a lab-created rhino embryo into a surrogate rhino mother for the first time, resulting in pregnancy. This could be a big step towards saving the northern white rhino, a […]

At first glance, southeastern Libya looks like an unforgiving land of sand and barren mountains. However, look closer and you’ll see clues that the desert is home to a massive underground oasis.  Images taken by satellites and astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) show that Libya’s Kufrah district is not as desolate as it […]

Animals should have the right to vote, according to a recent paper. Check your calendars – we promise it’s not April Fool’s Day yet.  “The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous,” the paper begins, accurately summarizing most people’s thoughts upon reading that headline. But, author Ioan-Radu Motoarcă goes on to […]

Dolphins have been observed interacting with manatee calves in unusual behavior, some of which has been aggressive and hostile. But while researchers are not sure why they are doing it, it is clearly deliberate.  Over a 21-year period, researchers documented 10 interactions between bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates) and Antillean manatee calves (Trichechus manatus manatus) in […]

Tables get dull pretty quickly. Sure they may have a nice pattern on them, or be made of some particularly fancy wood, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve basically seen them all. Just variation after variation of the “big flat thing on top of some legs” model which hasn’t really changed since we first started […]

Here at IFLScience, we love some good animal news – and today, it comes in the form of Ariel the cocker spaniel. Born with multiple birth defects and abandoned at 11 weeks old, Ariel was then rescued and has now successfully received surgery that removed her two extra limbs, giving her a bright future ahead. […]

Dotted throughout the mountainous Kabayan municipality in the Philippines, dozens of secretly concealed “fire mummies” have lain undisturbed for hundreds of years. Known by locals as meking, these well-preserved corpses belong to the ancient ancestors of the Indigenous Ibaloi, yet environmental changes now threaten to destroy these revered remains. The popular term “fire mummy” derives […]

Animals have a whole range of means to survive the cold, from thick fur and warm dens to simply sleeping through the cold winter months. Alligators might not be the first creatures that come to mind when thinking about survival tactics for cold weather, but videos reveal that freezing right along with the lake is […]

In a rare event, the Sun has simultaneously released two mighty solar flares separated by 500,000 kilometers (300,000 miles). The last 48 hours have seen remarkable behavior on the Sun, even by the standards of its last, highly active, year. Two sunspots, AR3559 and AR3561, have been filmed flaring simultaneously. The flares do not reach […]

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a clutch of like-minded folks are constructing a monumental clock that’s designed to last for 10,000 years. Its purpose, apparently, is to be an icon of “long-term thinking” and inspire people to dream far beyond the limited scope of a human lifetime. The project is the brainchild of computer scientist […]

The birthplaces of stars have never looked this good. Thanks to the keen infrared eye of JWST, which can see through some of the gas and dust that make up star-forming clouds, humans have gotten new insights into some incredible nebulae – and with beautiful pictures, too. The latest one is an image of N79 […]

A firm hoping to place the first private space station into low-Earth orbit has taken its latest steps towards that goal, inflating and then blowing up a test module. Sierra Space, based in Colorado, designed an expandable module which is only inflated to its full capacity once it is in orbit. The Large Integrated Flexible […]

Representing a 3D world on a 2D map is always going to end up with some issues and some compromises. No matter how accurate you try to make it, you will end up with stretched areas, squashed countries, or else parts of the map cut out altogether. The map you are likely familiar with is […]